


Fever

by Onyxed



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 11:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16174592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onyxed/pseuds/Onyxed
Summary: Daryl has a fever dream and "talks" to Beth.





	Fever

**Author's Note:**

> Needless to say I hate Daryl's arch,don't even get me started on Beth's. This show has become such a train wreck for me. I stopped watching since season 6. That being said, not that it matters, but this is part of my 100 Prompts challenge for myself. Which is why this is more of a drabble, but it was an ending that left me satisfied.

He knows better. In the vast majority of things that can kill a person in an apocalypse, he knows he should’ve gotten checked out sooner, by someone- anyone. It wasn’t until he was sweating, dizzy and collapsing into a fence that he realized any of this.

 

It hurts when they lift his shirt to exposed a gash on his ribs, sliced himself on a rusted fence running from a small herd of walkers.

 

“You should’a kissed me.” He doesn’t jolt at the sound of her voice. It’s haunted his dreams and nightmares since she left, long before someone put a bullet in her head. Everything hurts, but he still manages to look in the direction he imagined her voice coming from.

 

He could see her, clear as glass- real enough that if he reached out he thinks he’d feel the wool of her sweater or the slip of her pale curls through his fingers. “When?” His fingers flex dully against the sheets beneath him.

 

She smiles and the light seems to glint off every surface of her before she looks down at her feet as she leans against the frame of the door. Shining in her skin, glinting off her teeth and lashes. “Do you miss me, Daryl?” He can see her smile recede a little, unable to look at him. The sadness that sat in his bones mirrored in her tone. _You know I do_ , he thinks painfully.

 

But he’s never been able to express himself the way she wanted him to, he knows that. So, it’s hard to put into words how much he misses her. How when he sees the color blue it reminds him of her eyes. Her wide eyes that could pierce right through him, a burning flash of vibrant life. When they meet new people, good people, he wants to tell her. Tell her she was right... about everything. The words sit on his tongue like a loaded gun- unable to pull the trigger. When someone picks Judith up or plays with her, it sends an ache through his chest at how she used to protect Judith so fiercely. As if she were her own mother.

 

He knows how much Beth wanted that, to be someone’s mother. She’d tried to harden herself against it, to no avail.

 

“I wanted to live with you…” He says, his voice groggy and broken even to his own ears.

 

“We did.” She says simply, in that voice so sure and quiet. “We lived.”

 

His eyes sting with the weight of how wrong she was. “You’re dead.” He croaks. He’s so angry that words send a riot of coughs through his chest, wet and painful. He can feel the tears sliding down his cheeks. “You’re gone.” He spits out the words. “I wake up but I can still feel you… heavy in my arms. Sometimes… I think I can remember the smell of your blood better than I can remember your voice…”

 

He can feel her soft gaze on him as the confession spills out of him.

 

“We couldn’t even bury you.” He remembers that day, how much had happened that he still hadn’t said out loud.

 

“Tell me what happened, Daryl.” Beth tilts her head, eyes sparking with loss. Like that night on the porch, their skin hot with moonshine and things they’d left unsaid. Pristine and sparkling on his shelf of regrets.

 

“I miss you sayin’ my name.” They both know what happened that day. It was her death, her loss, and he’d been there for all of it. “You tried to save Noah, remember?”

 

“I wanted to protect him. The way you protected me.”

 

He looks at her pointedly. “No.” he says sharply. “Not like me and you.” Falling back into their way of saying it and not saying at the same time. “You stabbed Dawn. And she shot you.” He watches, unflinching as her hand lifts to her unmarked forehead. Pushing back the soft curls as her fingers run a line to the back of her skull, the exit wound. “I killed her.” He continues, “I killed her and I carried you out of there. You got out…”

 

Her eyes are wide and unyielding as she listens to him. “What else?”

 

“I brought you to Maggie.” He remembers how Maggie tried to reach for her dead little sister, how he couldn’t bear letting go of her body. The last real bit of her he had in that moment. He remembers knowing it was selfish, but that he couldn’t let her go. “She misses you.”

 

“I know.” She says quietly, so soft as her head tilts a little. Eyeing with something that was like pity, maybe he imagined she mourned the life she lost to. Maybe that look was only partly about him.

 

“I carried you, like that day in the kitchen. You were in my arms.” He pauses, his hand falling over his own wound.  

 

“What happened to me, Daryl?”

 

“We were taking your body back to the church. A herd came and we needed to get out of there. We tried to use another car but-“ There’s a piercing twinge in his wound, watering his eyes and gripping his throat. “It wouldn’t start!” He shouts. True to form she doesn’t flinch. She’s watching him with those clear eyes, the ones that saw the truth in everything. In him.

 

He can feel himself crumbling in the memory. “Rick said I had to leave you. I didn’t want to… I didn’t want- couldn’t let them…” He can’t say it though, the things the dead would do to her body. What the living might do if they ever stumbled on her. “I laid you in the trunk of the car, the one that wouldn’t start. Maggie kissed your forehead and I…”

 

“You what?” Daryl realized he’d begun to stare at her shoes as he recalled that horrible day. Her question draws him back to her face.

 

“I put one of my bolts in your hand.”

 

“You didn’t have flowers.” She whispers, breathless. Her wistful voice envelopes him and somehow, though they had almost no time at all, it felt like home.

 

“I kept thinking about that night, the one when we hid in the trunk together.” Almost unthinkably, she smiles at the memory. “I wanted to crawl into that trunk with you, close it over us and just disappear.”

 

He watches avidly as Beth walks over to him. The silence is buzzing around his head as she kneels beside his bed, lifting her hand to push the sweaty strands from his forehead. Her skin is warm, warmer than he remembers. She begins to hum and it’s the sweetest thing he thinks he’s heard since before she went away. Beth presses her lips to his brow. “Did you love me, Daryl?”

 

“Yeah.” If she were real she would’ve laughed at the casualty in his tone. As if it didn’t take the end of the world and death and tragedy to get here. As if it wasn’t already much too late.

 

“I love you too, Daryl.” He falls asleep in her arms, and it a relief he doesn’t think he’s ever felt before. He’s always been the protector, the defender, the soldier or henchman. It that moment though, as the fever drowned him, he felt safe. She had him, and they could be together now.


End file.
